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Deeplinks Blog

Deeplinks Blog

EFF is now accepting nominations for The Foilies 2019, our fifth annual “anti-awards” program for government agencies that, whether by maliciousness or incompetence, interfere with the right to access public information. It’s a tongue-in-cheek affair celebrating Sunshine Week (March 10-16, 2019), when a coalition of transparency organizations raise...

We’ve taken Internet service companies and platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to task for bad content moderation practices that remove speech and silence voices that deserve to be heard. We’ve catalogued their awful decisions. We’ve written about their ambiguous policies, inconsistent enforcement, and...

Correction 12/4/18: This post has been edited to correct the description of the new exemption, and to acknowledge the contributions of SPN, LCA, and Harvard. Online games have finally found their way into the video game preservation exemption to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This...

The European Union is fumbling towards a final draft of the new "Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive," including the controversial "Article 13," which requires all but the smallest online platforms to set up crowdsourced databases of copyrighted works and censor anything a user posts that matches (or...

Join Boston VR & The Public VR Lab to demo and hear about ways civic-focused technologists are using VR/XR in the public interest space. EFF Web Developer Laura Schatzkin and Senior Investigative Researcher Dave Maass will discuss EFF's virtual reality tool, Spot the Surveillance. Attendees will have the opportunity...

Thanksgiving is a time to take stock of what’s happened in the past year and focus on the things that we appreciate most. In the spirit of the holiday, we here at EFF are taking some time to name some things that we’re giving thanks for this year—from victories that...

The first-ever entirely nonfiction issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly, The End of Trust (Issue 54), features more than thirty writers and artists investigating surveillance in the digital age. The issue includes essays and interviews about technology, privacy, and surveillance, featuring many EFF authors—including EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, Special Advisor...

Do you need some stimulating reading material for this long holiday weekend? Here’s a great option: the latest issue of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The End of Trust. This is a collection of essays and interviews about technology, privacy, and surveillance, featuring many EFF authors—including EFF Executive...

The EU’s “Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive” is closer than ever to becoming law in 28 European countries, and the deep structural flaws in its most controversial clauses have never been more evident. Some background: the European Union had long planned on introducing a new copyright directive in...

EFF and MuckRock have filed hundreds of public records requests with law enforcement agencies around the country to reveal how data collected from automated license plate readers (ALPR) is used to track the travel patterns of drivers. We focused exclusively on departments that contract with surveillance vendor Vigilant Solutions to...

EFF’s annual Pioneer Awards Ceremony recognizes extraordinary individuals for their commitment and leadership in extending freedom and innovation on the electronic frontier. At this year’s event held on September 27 in San Francisco, EFF rededicated the Pioneer Awards to EFF co-founder and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. Barlow’s...

This year, we celebrated the fourth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank. Alice made clear that generic computers do not make abstract ideas eligible for patent protection. Following the decision, district courts across the country started rejecting ineligible abstract patents at early...

Despite igniting controversy over ethical lapses and the threat to civil liberties posed by its tattoo recognition experiments the first time around, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently completed its second major project evaluating software designed to reveal who we are and potentially what we believe based...